Understanding satire and humor is a challenging task for even current Vision-Language models. In this paper, we propose the challenging tasks of Satirical Image Detection (detecting whether an image is satirical), Understanding (generating the reason behind the image being satirical), and Completion (given one half of the image, selecting the other half from 2 given options, such that the complete image is satirical) and release a high-quality dataset ***YesBut***, consisting of 2547 images, 1084 satirical and 1463 non-satirical, containing different artistic styles, to evaluate those tasks. Each satirical image in the dataset depicts a normal scenario, along with a conflicting scenario which is funny or ironic. Despite the success of current Vision-Language Models on multimodal tasks such as Visual QA and Image Captioning, our benchmarking experiments show that such models perform poorly on the proposed tasks on the ***YesBut*** Dataset in Zero-Shot Settings w.r.t both automated as well as human evaluation. Additionally, we release a dataset of 119 real, satirical photographs for further research.

In task-oriented dialogue systems, intent detection is crucial for interpreting user queries and providing appropriate responses. Existing research primarily addresses simple queries with a single intent, lacking effective systems for handling complex queries with multiple intents and extracting different intent spans. Additionally, there is a notable absence of multilingual, multi-intent datasets. This study addresses three critical tasks: extracting multiple intent spans from queries, detecting multiple intents, and developing a multilingual multi-label intent dataset. We introduce a novel multi-label multi-class intent detection dataset (MLMCID-dataset) curated from existing benchmark datasets. We also propose a pointer network-based architecture (MLMCID) to extract intent spans and detect multiple intents with coarse and fine-grained labels in the form of sextuplets. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates the superiority of our pointer network based system over baseline approaches in terms of accuracy and F1-score across various datasets.

In this paper, we propose sequence-based pre-training methods to enhance procedural understanding in natural language processing. Procedural text, containing sequential instructions to accomplish a task, is difficult to understand due to the changing attributes of entities in the context. We focus on recipes as they are commonly represented as ordered instructions, and use this order as a supervision signal. Our work is one of the first to compare several ‘order-as-supervision’ transformer pre-training methods, including Permutation Classification, Embedding Regression, and Skip-Clip, and show that these methods give improved results compared to baselines and SoTA LLMs on two downstream Entity-Tracking datasets: NPN-Cooking dataset in recipe domain and ProPara dataset in open domain. Our proposed methods address the non-trivial Entity Tracking Task that requires prediction of entity states across procedure steps, which requires understanding the order of steps. These methods show an improvement over the best baseline by 1.6% and 7-9% on NPN-Cooking and ProPara Datasets respectively across metrics.

Radiology Report Generation (R2Gen) demonstrates how Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can automate the creation of accurate and coherent radiological reports. Existing methods often hallucinate details in text-based reports that don’t accurately reflect the image content. To mitigate this, we introduce a novel strategy, SERPENT-VLM (SElf Refining Radiology RePort GENeraTion using Vision Language Models), which improves the R2Gen task by integrating a self-refining mechanism into the MLLM framework. We employ a unique self-supervised loss that leverages similarity between pooled image representations and the contextual representations of the generated radiological text, alongside the standard Causal Language Modeling objective, to refine image-text representations. This allows the model to scrutinize and align the generated text through dynamic interaction between a given image and the generated text, therefore reducing hallucination and continuously enhancing nuanced report generation. SERPENT-VLM outperforms existing baselines such as LlaVA-Med, BiomedGPT, etc., achieving SoTA performance on the IU X-ray and Radiology Objects in COntext (ROCO) datasets, and also proves to be robust against noisy images. A qualitative case study emphasizes the significant advancements towards more sophisticated MLLM frameworks for R2Gen, opening paths for further research into self-supervised refinement in the medical imaging domain.

In this paper, we propose ***CLMSM***, a domain-specific, continual pre-training framework, that learns from a large set of procedural recipes. ***CLMSM*** uses a Multi-Task Learning Framework to optimize two objectives - a) Contrastive Learning using hard triplets to learn fine-grained differences across entities in the procedures, and b) a novel Mask-Step Modelling objective to learn step-wise context of a procedure. We test the performance of ***CLMSM*** on the downstream tasks of tracking entities and aligning actions between two procedures on three datasets, one of which is an open-domain dataset not conforming with the pre-training dataset. We show that ***CLMSM*** not only outperforms baselines on recipes (in-domain) but is also able to generalize to open-domain procedural NLP tasks.

A law practitioner has to go through numerous lengthy legal case proceedings for their practices of various categories, such as land dispute, corruption, etc. Hence, it is important to summarize these documents, and ensure that summaries contain phrases with intent matching the category of the case. To the best of our knowledge, there is no evaluation metric that evaluates a summary based on its intent. We propose an automated intent-based summarization metric, which shows a better agreement with human evaluation as compared to other automated metrics like BLEU, ROUGE-L etc. in terms of human satisfaction. We also curate a dataset by annotating intent phrases in legal documents, and show a proof of concept as to how this system can be automated.

The main contribution of this paper is to fine-tune transformer-based language models pre-trained on several text corpora, some being general (E.g., Wikipedia, BooksCorpus), some being the corpora from which the CompLex Dataset was extracted, and others being from other specific domains such as Finance, Law, etc. We perform ablation studies on selecting the transformer models and how their individual complexity scores are aggregated to get the resulting complexity scores. Our method achieves a best Pearson Correlation of 0.784 in sub-task 1 (single word) and 0.836 in sub-task 2 (multiple word expressions).

We present the system description for our submission towards the Key Point Analysis Shared Task at ArgMining 2021. Track 1 of the shared task requires participants to develop methods to predict the match score between each pair of arguments and key points, provided they belong to the same topic under the same stance. We leveraged existing state of the art pre-trained language models along with incorporating additional data and features extracted from the inputs (topics, key points, and arguments) to improve performance. We were able to achieve mAP strict and mAP relaxed score of 0.872 and 0.966 respectively in the evaluation phase, securing 5th place on the leaderboard. In the post evaluation phase, we achieved a mAP strict and mAP relaxed score of 0.921 and 0.982 respectively.

Answering questions asked from instructional corpora such as E-manuals, recipe books, etc., has been far less studied than open-domain factoid context-based question answering. This can be primarily attributed to the absence of standard benchmark datasets. In this paper, we meticulously create a large amount of data connected with E-manuals and develop a suitable algorithm to exploit it. We collect E-Manual Corpus, a huge corpus of 307,957 E-manuals, and pretrain RoBERTa on this large corpus. We create various benchmark QA datasets which include question answer pairs curated by experts based upon two E-manuals, real user questions from Community Question Answering Forum pertaining to E-manuals etc. We introduce EMQAP (E-Manual Question Answering Pipeline) that answers questions pertaining to electronics devices. Built upon the pretrained RoBERTa, it harbors a supervised multi-task learning framework which efficiently performs the dual tasks of identifying the section in the E-manual where the answer can be found and the exact answer span within that section. For E-Manual annotated question-answer pairs, we show an improvement of about 40% in ROUGE-L F1 scores over most competitive baseline. We perform a detailed ablation study and establish the versatility of EMQAP across different circumstances. The code and datasets are shared at https://github.com/abhi1nandy2/EMNLP-2021-Findings, and the corresponding project website is https://sites.google.com/view/emanualqa/home.

The paper aims to classify different offensive content types in 3 code-mixed Dravidian language datasets. The work leverages existing state of the art approaches in text classification by incorporating additional data and transfer learning on pre-trained models. Our final submission is an ensemble of an AWD-LSTM based model along with 2 different transformer model architectures based on BERT and RoBERTa. We achieved weighted-average F1 scores of 0.97, 0.77, and 0.72 in the Malayalam-English, Tamil-English, and Kannada-English datasets ranking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd on the respective shared-task leaderboards.